I called my mother on Sunday from a stoop on 30th Avenue in Astoria, where I'd wandered after brunch because I wasn't ready to go home yet.
Astoria always makes me a little homesick, which is a funny thing to admit. It's the smell, I think. Somewhere between a bakery and a grill and someone's grandmother's cooking. It reminds me of the lanes near my house without looking anything like them.
So I sat on a stranger's steps and called Ba.
The connection was bad. It's always bad. There's a delay where we both start talking, then both stop, then both say sorry, then both laugh. Twenty-four years of me and this woman still tripping over each other's sentences across an ocean.
She asked if I was eating properly. I lied. She knew I lied. This is our whole relationship.
Then she asked, quieter, when I was coming home. And I did the thing I always do, I said soon, Ba, soon, and looked up at the sky over Queens so my voice wouldn't crack.
Here's what homesickness actually is, I've decided. It's not wanting to leave New York. I love this city with something close to obsession. It's wanting to be in two places at once and grieving that you can't.
It's hearing your mother's voice and wanting to fold it up and put it in your pocket.
We watched an old Amitabh film once, the two of us, and she cried at a scene about a son leaving. I didn't understand it then. I was maybe fifteen. I understand it now, on a stoop in Astoria, with the N train rumbling somewhere behind me.
Before we hung up she said, beta, wherever you are, you're still mine. And that's the whole thing, isn't it. Distance doesn't undo belonging.
I stayed on that stoop a while after. Just breathing the Astoria air that smells almost like home.
Some love travels across every ocean, no roaming charges.
Love,